The Freezer Door

by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore

A meditation on the trauma and possibility of searching for connection in a world that enforces bland norms of gender, sexual, and social conformity. The Freezer Door records the ebb and flow of desire in daily life. Crossing through loneliness in search of communal pleasure in Seattle, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore exposes the failure and persistence of queer dreams, the hypocritical allure of gay male sexual culture, and the stranglehold of the suburban imagination over city life.

Ferocious and tender, The Freezer Door offers a complex meditation on the trauma and possibility of searching for connection in a world that relentlessly enforces bland norms of gender, sexual, and social conformity while claiming to celebrate diversity.

Genres: Queer, Memoir, Nonfiction, LGBT, Poetry, Biography Memoir, Essays

186 pages, Unknown Binding

First published November 24, 2020

About the author

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore is the award-winning author of The Freezer Door, a New York Times Editors’ Choice, one of Oprah Magazine’s Best LGBTQ Books of 2020, and a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award. Winner of a Lambda Literary Award and an American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book, she’s the author of three novels and three nonfiction titles, and the editor of six nonfiction anthologies, most recently Between Certain Death and a Possible Future: Queer Writing on Growing Up with the AIDS Crisis. Sycamore lives in Seattle, and her new book, Touching the Art, will be released on November 7, 2023.

Reviews

[Michelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

(Matt)ilda Bernstein Sycamore (MBS) is the author of several memoirs and non-fictional accounts of a variety of subject matter concerning LGBTQ culture. In “The Freezer Door” (2020) the style of stream-of-consciousness thought and observation is featured-- from her congested urban neighborhood in Seattle, Washington. Ms. Bernstein Sycamore has lived in NYC and San Francisco and recalled her immense love for JoAnne (1974-95), her inspiration from the Whitney Museum, the writing of author-AIDS activist David Wojnarowicz (1954-92) though was less impressed with the late celebrity author/educator Kathy Acker (1947-97) seen as she roared up years ago on her motorcycle.

In many ways, MBS experienced difficulty meaningfully connecting with others (sexually and otherwise) beyond a superficial level. The men she really liked seldom kept in touch, or returned her calls. MBS observed a vegan diet, and had several allergies, that included smoke machines from bars and dance clubs, though she remained sober and avoided alcohol. “The Seattle Freeze”— a term coined in recent years, is a total avoidance and disregard of others typically in community and social settings, and is quite common today. The tech industry has boldly arrived-- Seattle neighborhoods have been drastically impacted by gentrification; as oversize industrial trucks haul debris away from where stately old homes once stood and have been torn down. This makes room for new business, multi-unit housing, and massive apartment developments. MBS was shocked at her huge rent increase; as many lower wage workers are forced out of Seattle.

Ms. MBS wrote briefly of abuse by her (deceased) psychiatrist father, it was unclear if she was currently in therapy. Several anonymous sexual encounters were recalled with men behind massive tree’s and large shrubs in a Seattle public park— once, she was almost caught-- by a lady walking her dog, who likely looked the other way. It is necessary to not overlook these parts of the storyline; the confessional graphic details were weaved in throughout the book with her astute situational and emotional observations. MBS has written a previous memoir: “The End of San Francisco”(2013) and is the contributing editor of: “Tricks and Treats: Sex Workers Write About Their Clients” (2014) - also “Dangerous Families: Queer Writing on Surviving” (2011) **With thanks to the Seattle Public Library .

[Erik · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The opposite of nostalgia is truth," Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore writes in The Freezer Door, her powerful reflection on community and queerness and the trauma that influences us all.

Mattilda came of age in the 90s, her queerness shaped by the death and activism of the AIDS crisis and the dance and music of rave culture. Finding herself caught between the various monikers used to describe the people in the LGBTQ+ community, she settles on "queer" and then spends many years trying to figure out how she can find the community she desires, the sex life that fulfulls her, and a sense of self that has reconciled with past traumas. Surrounded by a community of queers who constantly wax nostalgic for a bygone era (that never truly existed), these same queers can't follow through and love each other and participate in the community that is right in front of their faces (all because they are caught trying to recreate a 1970s community that never existed the way nostalgia has painted it for them.)

At times the book can be a bit too self-righteous - (I am glad she finally buys a cell phone by the end of the book) - but the commentary is incisive and important. Many pages of my copy of The Freezer Door are dog-earred so that I can return to them and reflect on the poignant comments she makes throughout the book. This will definitely be a book I'll be returning to, and it's one you should be reading ASAP.

[Sarah Schulman]

Somewhere between Proust and Anais Nin, a modern diary of loneliness and the will to connect. Mattilda is a wonderful writer, honest and playful, not afraid of feelings- in fact- in search of them. There is a duet here between an ice tray and an ice cube to help readers imagine what is going on behind the freezer door-that you will not find the likes of in any other work of art. I am a loyal fan and reader.

[Kathleen · Rating 5 out of 5]

My review for the Women's Review of Books:

https://www.wcwonline.org/Women-s-Rev...

It’s easy to see the pandemic as a rupture with the past. In March of 2020 we entered a new epoch, and yet, in many ways, the imperatives of social distancing are continuous with what came before: a shrinking public sphere, diminished opportunities for meaningful social interaction. Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore’s The Freezer Door is an intimate exploration of desire and its impossibility, as well as a critique of the waning possibilities for communal engagement with desire in everyday experience. A longtime activist and critic of cultural conformity, Sycamore identified these problems, particularly as they relate to queer communities, long before COVID, but this new book enters a world in which they feel more poignant than ever. As Sycamore herself has joked in videos and interviews, “I wrote a book about alienation and then everything got worse.”

Sycamore is the author of three novels and a memoir, as well as the editor of five anthologies, including the collection Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots? Flaming Challenges to Masculinity, Objectification, and the Desire to Conform. Like her previous work, The Freezer Door challenges the culture of queer assimilationism and documents her own search for sexual and intellectual intimacy. This deceptively slim volume is a slow read in the best possible way. I wanted to underline practically every sentence, and Sycamore strews her poetic fluidity with an almost overwhelming abundance of aphoristic utterances. A sampling: “Every gay bar is an accidental comedy routine. The best comedy routine is the one that takes itself seriously”; “I don’t want to become the cops, I want to end policing in all its forms”; “A sexual revolution without a political revolution isn’t a revolution at all, it’s just consumer choice branded as liberation.”

As seems fitting for a work that aims to challenge the very idea of the mainstream, Sycamore’s lyrical writing flows like stormwater, expressing her concern that “queer spaces have become places where the illusion of critical thinking hides the policing of thought,” and clarifying her desires: “I don’t want any team to win, I want to end winning.” This is an anarchic and unruly, yet dreamy and languid, meditation in fragments, full of unexpected juxtapositions and white space, in the tradition of such works as The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson and Socialist Realism by Trisha Low. The leapfrogging sections blend concrete personal experience and abstract theory to explore AIDS, cruising, trauma, loneliness, and connection.

Gentrification—particularly the cultural whitewashing and social isolation it produces—is one of the major objects of Sycamore’s critical gaze. Seattle, where Sycamore currently resides, receives a much-deserved dose of her disappointment. “This city that is and isn’t a city,” she writes, “but I guess that’s what every city is becoming now, a destination to imagine what imagination might be like, except for the lack.” If the marginalized don’t get washed out, they are pressured to blend in, adopting the trappings of the dominant culture. “When anything becomes homogenous, there’s a problem,” she writes. “When anything becomes so homogenous that people don’t even think about it, that’s worse.”

Like a latter-day, radically queer Jane Jacobs, Sycamore offers a biting appraisal of cosmopolitan existence for the twenty-first century. “The dream of urban living has always meant a density of experience,” she writes, “that random moment on the street that changes you. But now, when people say increasing the density, they mean building more luxury housing for new arrivals who only want an urban lifestyle with a walled-off suburban mentality—keep away difference, avoid unplanned interaction, don’t talk to anyone on the street because this might be dangerous.” She shines her wit like a flashlight on all that darkens her bright vision of what urban life should and shouldn’t be. For example, Sycamore is doing stretches, leaning on the exterior of a random apartment building, when “some fag wearing a backwards floral baseball cap tries to give me the straight gay attitude” for trespassing. The building is pretentiously named Onyx, although, “there’s nothing onyx—the building is grey, tan, and beige—it’s like Florida meets the supermarket.”

Sycamore slings plenty of zingers, and her targets are righteous, but she’s a lover, not a hater—a lover of trust, of beauty, and of genuine connection in all its forms, not only between romantic partners but between people and their friends, people and their architecture, people and trees, and on and on. What stuns me about her criticism is its gentleness—the ways she finds to be forceful but not harmful, always punching up, so to speak, or really not even punching at all, only highlighting blind spots and inviting her readers to open their eyes to more than the restricted array of consumerist possibilities that late capitalism presents as our only options. “I wonder if I’m the only person who still goes outside thinking something magnificent and unexpected might happen,” she writes in one of many sentences that encourage the reader to wonder too, and not just about that question, but to engage in more wonder in general.

If the book opens us up to wonder and to the unexpected, one of its strategies is its formal subversions, such as the titular “freezer door.” The already broken narrative is periodically interrupted by a dialogue taking place inside a freezer between an ice cube and an ice cube tray. The two discuss global warming, elections, the Supreme Court, gentrification, and a number of other pressing present-day problems. In doing so, they raise issues of freedom and community, safety and risk. “The only open relationship is the open door, says the ice cube tray.”

When the ice cube asks, “Why do people hate poetry,” the ice cube tray replies “Because it’s like us.” There are a lot of different ways a reader could take this fanciful back and forth, but one of the most liberating seems to be that, in a system that reduces lived experience to a set of commercial preferences that can be easily marketed to, and that boxes people into the tyranny of narratives inoffensive to the status quo, poetry can be a means of dismantling linguistic traps and offering a greater array of prospects for thinking and being. As Franco “Bifo” Berardi writes in The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance—another recent might-as-well-just-dip-the-whole-book-in-highlighter manifesto I happened to encounter shortly before The Freezer Door—“as deregulated predatory capitalism is destroying the future of the planet and of social life, poetry is going to play a new game: the game of reactivating the social body.” Poetry, and poetic books like Sycamore’s, put forth the necessary strategies to open the freezer door. One of the many wondrous aspects of Sycamore’s approach becomes not only what she’s saying, but how she’s saying it.

That said, as Sycamore notes, “uncritical consumption of critical engagement is still uncritical engagement,” and there are aspects of her book that some readers may find hard to appreciate. That, too, seems to be part of her intent: to invite readers to reset the way they gauge their own taste and what does and does not strike them as offensive. She uses the word “faggot” a great deal (advisedly and informedly, and to continue her critique of assimilationist gayness and internalized homophobia) and writes quite explicitly about fucking strangers in public parks and bathrooms. Some audiences possessed of “an overinvestment in middle-class norms” might find this material obscene, but that’s partly her point.

Rather than employing taboo and transgression as ends unto themselves, Sycamore transgresses in order to urge her audience to interrogate their almost-invisible suppositions and so-called civil decorum. She subverts the hypocrisies that tend to make people—especially self-described liberal people—uncomfortable, particularly the trend among American cities’ mainstream citizens to profess support for diversity while really favoring a bland and superficial aesthetic with little actual politics behind it. Sycamore’s strategic obscenity suggests that the real obscenity might lie elsewhere, like in trying to deny and erase difference because of the alternative it poses to putative good taste or consumerist decency.

“Part of the dream of queer is that it potentially has no opposite. Straight is the opposite of gay. Queer is a rejection of both.” The Freezer Door stands as a call to open the door and take a gamble on what might be outside—to reject the illusion of safety and try instead for a re-enchantment of everything, a magic that can only happen by reaching beyond “walled-off insufficiency.”

[Eva (now on Hardcover) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Like nothing I’ve ever read, in the best way. I often put down the book for minutes at a time just to process what I’d felt. There’s a lot of pain in this book, but also beauty and joy and wisdom.

“I remember the playground, where they called me sissy and faggot before I knew what those words meant, but I knew they meant I would never belong.” (p. 49)

“When someone asks you how you’re feeling, and you tell them, and then they want to tell you why you’re feeling the way you’re feeling, you wonder why they asked.” (p. 51)

“Part of the dream of queer is that it potentially has no opposite. Straight is the opposite of gay. Queer is a rejection of both.” (p. 71)

“When someone else’s desire is what makes me feel mine, does this mean this is someone else’s desire?” (p. 85)

“I don’t just want islands of closeness without a connecting structure, I want relationships that I feel in my body as a cellular possibility.” (p. 89)

“Sometimes you play the same song so much that you up hating it, but then one day you wake up thinking: Why don’t I play that song anymore?” (p. 97)

“A dominant narrative is always a form of erasure.” (p. 99)

“Whenever you think your memory is not as good as it used to be, it’s important to remember there used to be less to remember.” (p. 137)

“Sometimes the violence of people allegedly trying to help is the worst kind of violence.” (p. 177)

“The best thing about a rhetorical question is the answer.” (p. 178)

“A question of aesthetics is barely a question at all. When this is all we treasure, there is no way not to lose.” (p. 199)

“I don’t believe in nostalgia because it camouflages violence.” (p. 227)

“Love is love isn’t the most helpful rhetoric for those of us who grew up abused by the people who told us they loved us the most.” (p. 231)

[BookChampions · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 stars:

I needed this book in my life. It felt like I was sitting down with a queer mentor---and finding any mentor is hard---soaking up all they had to tell me. I could have easily read its 270 pages in one sitting; my attention was rapt.

The structure of *The Freezer Door* defies convention. Its "essays" and "mini-essays" are neither numbered chapters or cleanly separated. Their fluidity is a part of their power since Mattilda's book is itself a manifesto on unconventionality and an unabashed search for a meaning of the word "queer" that makes room for us all. Her Emersonian aphorisms abound; I feel like I could open the book to any page and find a sentence that I could think about for days.

It's a book about loneliness, feeling like an outsider, the nature of human desire and how sex is both of and set apart from that, and finding home in one's body. Mattilda is a Literary Lambda Award winner with several books I'm just now learning about. I'm so happy to have learned from her and look forward to reading more!

[Mattilda also shares a deep distaste for leaf blowers, and all I can say to that is, HELL YES! 🍃🍂]

[Zach Werbalowsky · Rating 3 out of 5]

at times brilliant and insightful and at times tedious. Its an interesting read that is uneven (to me).

[Sophy H · Rating 1 out of 5]

Well I gave it 69 pages, and no more! I have hours of my life that I need to conserve for meaningful activity!

By rights I should have loved this book, musings on gender, sexuality and lived experience within a changing city. Instead, this book is just a bizarre set of ramblings from someone who seems very unhappy in themselves and with their surroundings.

There is no focus to the writing, no cohesion, no sense, just endless drivel. The ice cube conversation?!!!! What in the actual?!!!! Talk about filling pages.

It's not just a no, it's a hell no!

[Jim Gladstone · Rating 4 out of 5]

Almost indescribably eclectic in both prose style and cornucopic social content, the sometimes dizzying, frequently devastating memoirs and au-tobiographical novels of Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore (Sketchtasy, The End of San Francisco, Pulling Taffy) prickle and tickle all at once. None more so than his latest, in which the genderqueer logonaut takes his pen to the gentrification and whitewashing of our cities and our bodies. What at first may feel like an unedited stream-of-consciousness turns out to shrewdly loop back on itself as the author exposes harsh ironies of con-temporary American LGBTQ life. On post-PrEP urbanity: “We live in a far different world than the one where an HIV diagnosis meant imminent death, but we also live in a world where public demand for a cure is nearly nonexistent.” On internet hook-ups: “The best way to avoid bad sex is to search for good sex online, until you can’t find anything but the search-ing.”
Mixing horror with humor, this is a book in which the author’s painful memories of being raped by his father jostle up against his hoariest of dad jokes. Experimental, yes; and the test tubes get thrillingly fizzy.

[grostulate]

Personal account of public sex and the desire for intimacy against the backdrop of the rapidly gentrifying, capitalist city. The anxiety of how even your most personal relations come to be cauterised by platforms and systems. Lack of any means to address trauma or any sort of difference meaningfully. The slow creep of gentrification that demands ever increasing commitment to homogeneity. A parallel dream vision of the city as endless possibility for new encounters and relations everyday.

The themes that underpin the book are ones that I am intensely interested in, and I imagine that they will only grow more necessary to examine as the COVID emergency abates. I like the device of having sentient consumer objects, but I didn’t understand the significance of the freezer door and its ice cube tray. Structure was highly fragmented, to the point at which the style read like a hybrid of unedited diary and twitter account, each paragraph studded with aphorisms. I wanted more of a defined structure to engage with, or a map sometimes it felt like ‘internet brain’ translated as a style. But as it turns out: 'I believed [desire] was a map. But no one believes in maps anymore’

[Kamilla · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is about as good as you'd expect from 260 pages of stream of consciousness writing. If this was condensed into say 50-100 pages of the best insights it would be a marvel - there are some great thoughts on the growth of American cities, the urban experience, LGBTQ issues, etc. But it was tedious to read about encounter after encounter of random sex in the park, followed by lamentations of how the author can't find meaningful connection but yet doesn't want to fall into conformist romantic relationships so continues looking for something that they'll never find. Also using their trust fund to buy a condo so that they don't get priced out of their neighborhood while complaining about how gentrification is ruining their definition of what city life should be. It just felt like a lot of needless whining in the end with no real resolution.

[Julene · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm a huge fan of Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore's writing. She is a historian of the gay movement, and a contemporary who is documenting life through a lens that is unique and important to question current norms.

In The Freezer Door, the most delightful parts are the ice cube and ice cube tray in conversation where we feel the questions outside the normal questions we all hold in our head. What is it like to be in interaction with another, sometimes much like the ice cube and it's tray, we are stuck together but what we have in common is not something that we're a part of, which of course brings the book to it's many political statements on the culture we live in.

Toned down and gentrified to nearly dead at times, how is a body to live in this culture. And then relationships, it's very obvious that the title refers also to the Seattle freeze, people who know Seattle know this term. It's a hard place to make close friends. It's hard to live in a city where no one has time to interact unless living together, and sometimes that doesn't even help! So the ice cube and the ice tray talking is truly an apt metaphor because they live together and talk to each other by way of asking unanswerable questions. Brilliant.

The book is selling out, getting awards, and Mattilda has done a world tour reading different sections at each online reading with many writers, like Maggie Nelson, who has a blurb on the back of The Freezer Door. The absolute best is to hear Mattilda read the book, so when you read the book you will have her voice in your head. It will open your world to the questions we need to break out of the stasis where we get stuck.

[Katherine Shaw · Rating 5 out of 5]

So many insights on desire, intimacy, writing, beginnings and endings. Such flow between thought and scene. One of those books that makes you want to write a book like it, in how it feels interior and outward, speaks to itself and you so closely. Love the character of Seattle in the book. A few quotes I’m keeping with me:

“The most expensive art is a sense of belonging. The best way to remember a sense of belonging is to remember incorrectly. The correct memory is a memory of nothing. Nothing costs more than nothing. Remembering nothing costs more than remembering.”

“How the present becomes a presence, a presence we don’t want. How history works this way, our own histories, internalized without our consent. When we believe in the lie, we make it impossible to imagine the truth. This is obvious, but why is it not obvious?”

“When the writing stops, and suddenly it feels like I have not access into how I actually feel. Or maybe I mean I can only feel. There’s so much guilt in not writing. Or not writing what you want. Or not writing in the ways you want to.
People talk about the blood-brain barrier, but there’s also the text-brain barrier, and the glory of writing is when you cross it. You’re inside the gaps, and they are windows.
But then these are windows into other gaps, and you’re stuck.
But the glory of writing is when you suddenly realize a way out, which is also a way in.”

“There is so much potential joy in the dynamic between writing and thinking, thinking and dreaming, dreaming and fear, fear and loss, loss and writing.”

“Vilma says, ‘A queen was anyone who was gay and didn’t try to hide it,’ and I’m still with her.

[hannah ⭐️ · Rating 4 out of 5]

okayyy, my thoughts and feelings for this one are not easy to put into words!!

such an intimate and intense analysis of everyday (queer) life, from a trans feminine perspective on gay culture, cities and gentrification, desire, hope, hopelessness and so much more.
a perspective i cannot always relate to but still so much that feels familiar. a very specific and detailed analysis of everything, really just broken down which felt incredibly intense, thought provoking, but also tiring at a point because everything was questioned, every word interchanged and analyzed to the smallest point which made it exhausting to read at times. i feel like some of the topics and remarks went past me because of that.

still an incredible book, i’ll be reading more of her!!

[b · Rating 5 out of 5]

“And then I find a book that I really love, and I talk about it for a while so it won’t seem like I hate everything. In other words, I hate everything” (82).

Probably the most memorable, and certainly the most dog-eared, book of non-fiction I’ve encountered in, well, 20 years? Since I’ve had a reading consciousness, since I’ve become more worried and more angry but more open and more honest.

Just read this. There’s no world this doesn’t enrich your life, that you won’t take its hand to rush to the impromptu dance floor that it offers.

[Sam · Rating 4 out of 5]

I got absorbed in this. I have lived in Seattle almost my entire life and this book perfectly portrays the cold flakiness of this city that I love-hate, gentrified and disfigured beyond recognition, and full of connection without connection. Maybe it’s just that I’m another queer and trans person with chronic health probs but the layers of isolation that Mattilda explores here really reached me. I love the sense of place she conjures here, woozy scenes weaving together, dreamlike moments of almost-connection with others that frequently fail to achieve any real intimacy, and language that turns in on itself. And there’s still a sharp, truly queer critique of assimilationist gay male culture beneath it all. When I was done, I wasn’t entirely sure what I’d just read, but I think I want more of it.

[Jessica Ranard · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't know where to start, but I am sad because I finished this book and I am happy because I loved every word of The Freezer Door. I don't know how to describe this book - rumination after thought after diary entry after joke after something else. I guess I'll just leave you with a few quotes from the book because why not?

Here:

"The problem of living. The problem of living in spite of it all. The problem of changing the larger world if we can't change ourselves. The problem of changing ourselves, if we can't change the larger world. The problem of existing in this world anyway. The problem of not existing."

And:

"When someone says the body never lies, I wonder if they have ever had a body."

And:

"I suppose it was inevitable that I would have a dream where Donald Trump hires me as a hooker"

And:

"When people say something like oh the youth or oh the elders, I really just want to laugh because it's not like anybody's doing a good job of anything."

And:

"The thing about the dance floor is I'm fearless. To find this place in my body where I can let go of dreaming and just feel. Or let go of feeling and just dream. I lean against the wall and it's pounding, I'm pounding."

I loved this book in the way that it made me want to go out dancing and meet a hundred people and have sex in public and cry in the bathtub and sit in the sun and be honest about the ways I hate the world and have people over for dinner. The Freezer Door is absolutely one of my favorites, which also means that I am simply going to have to read everything Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore has ever written. I feel less lonely after this book, but also less afraid of my own loneliness? What can I say, I am in love.

[Cameron Quijada · Rating 3 out of 5]

i liked ghis at first but then it got extremely repetitive and felt a tad (?)

[Delia Rainey · Rating 5 out of 5]

a vulnerable and effective blend of lyrical memoir and cultural criticism, with some experimental prose poems (?) of call-and-response convos between an ice cube and an ice tray. this is my favorite kind of book, a book that is mostly about walking around, going to different bars, trying to meet up with friends, meeting strangers, hooking up in the park, and missing friends -- the mundanity and intensity of longing for connection. interspersed, mattilda critiques the gentrification and "seattle freeze" of the people around her, of queer spaces, of protests, of patti smith books, of art shows. mattilda has an incredible self awareness to not hold nostalgia on a pedestal of old san francisco or the way gay communities used to be. she accepts that things are worse now in certain ways, and yet she keeps dancing at the club, she survives. she waits by the phone for friends and lovers to call, and sometimes they do. and all of this accounts for a kind of freedom: the connection of bodies, of touching someone in public, in private. mattilda writes about sex and wanting a sex life attached to emotions. yet the sex scenes in the park, against soft bark of trees, against the dirt, are so special and intimate. there are emotions there, too. this book is really great because dual realities exist like this. she is constantly making these dual/opposite aphorisms with beats of repetition in her writing -- at first, these statements felt cheesy to me, but by the end of reading "the freezer door", i found myself nodding my head, heart hurting -- "do you see how language hurts? how the lack of language hurts more. how both of these things can be true at the same time. how language isn't everything. and how it is." my simple review of this book is that mattilda bernstein sycamore is so sincere. at the core of this writing is a search for community, and isn't that the point of writing about our lives anyway?


"if you can't be so vulnerable in your writing that you think you might die, what's the point of writing?"

"what gives you hope is one of the most annoying questions. it's as if you have to feel hopeful in order to live."

"isn't this the point of writing -- the gasp of recognition, the recognition of the gasp?"

[Jacob · Rating 5 out of 5]

Maggie Nelson writes in her cover endorsement "In a happy paradox common to great literature, it's a book about not belonging that made me feel deeply less alone." I can't really say it better.

I loved Sycamore's's non-linear, weird, poetic memoir.

There's so much here that resonated about belonging to places and people and when that falls short, ie. by gentrification; ghosting; pinkwashing. There's no real plot here, kind of just snippets or vignettes: Sycamore's reflections and depictions of her everyday life and attempts to connect with others, from public sex with strangers (by turns blissful and alienating) to the magic of conversations with strangers, increasingly rare. While our lived experiences are different - she's a gender bending self-described fag, and I'm a vaguely cis bisexual woman who always feels somewhat at odds with gender - I could relate to so much of what she writes about fitting only imperfectly or uncomfortably or sporadically into queer community. It's your community, but it also isn't. And there's also not really anywhere else to go.

My sexual coming of age also happened in Seattle, and while I've never lived there, it was haunting for me personally to revisit it through Sycamore's narrative.

I liked the bits of narrative from the perspective of an ice cube and an ice cube tray, but I wanted them to be a bit better integrated. Are they linked to the 'Seattle freeze' (unfriendliness) Sycamore refers to? I wasn't sure I totally 'got' what she was going for.

Regardless, I loved this. I did a lot of underlining of particularly brilliant sentences and passages. I'll end with one:

"Feminism is the politic that has helped me to articulate myself, and queer is my embodied practice of staying alive. But I worry that queer spaces have become places where the illusion of critical thinking hides the policing of thought. I don't want any team to win. I want to end winning."

[Emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

Powerful and familiar.

[Zephy B · Rating 4 out of 5]

I can support any book with Patti Smith Slander

[Sabine · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm obsessed! This book filled me with longing, longing to be able to go out dancing, to be able to be casual again. But also longing in the sense of understanding and framing longing and expectations. I could listen to her talk [write] forever and feel like I am with a friend and also in my own head.

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mattilda has a unique way with looking at the world, and with words, turning a phrase on its head, or is that heading a phrase on its turn? She (hope that's the right pronoun, it's in the bio) looks at gentrification, Trump's election, friends and friendship, sex and how to find it and that whole nightmare in the world of technology now. I think what I liked best about this book (and I've read more of her writing, too) is that it forces you to look at your own perceptions of similar things in your own life, and maybe you get a chance to look at something from a really different angle. I loved that, love this window into how another person thinks. We're all different, of course, but then again we're all pretty much the same on some very basic levels.

[Sweetie · Rating 2 out of 5]

Mattilda ne matthew is a trustarfarian who has "written" a text about spending the day a) obsessing about their "pain," b) cruising parks and sex clubs, c) hugging trees, & d) composing judgement filled non-sense like this "book," a term I use v. loosely. Mattilda / Matt is a gay projectile: always quick to judge yet immune to that same indefatigable sense of right / wrong (a curious position for someone who seems to yearn to exist in-between binaries.)

There is zero plot to this text and, at times, I started to wonder if it was computer / AI generated. With virtually no editing, ideas are put forth and then dropped. For example, the intriguing idea of a group chat with other queers from high school (before a reunion) is floated but not followed up on.

The text is filled with some observations that land as insightful less because they're actually insightful but mildly contrarian to the corporate art culture that Mattilda / Matthew claims to despise. A "hatred" of Patti Smith - for her homophobic mythification of Robert Mapplethorpe - leads to a canny (though it's hardly an original observation) note that RM's death from AIDS made him a useful figure in her implausible narrative of happenstance fame.

Bernstein wants to have its cake (or, whatever won't make her "sick" - ah yes, the day-glo lollipop stuck inside the thrift store jacket) and critique Smith for her art monstrosity while obscuring the manical efforts implicit in not so much producing this dreck, as getting it out into the world and positioning it "acclaimed." (Anyone who knows Matt / Mattilda is aware of the persistent bids for quotes and reviews and attention {that, not surprisingly, are received without gratitude or reciprocity.})

As a cultural artifact of work produced by counter cultural figures of the 90's, "The Freezer Door" reminded me of the problem faced by another once "radical" author, Michelle Tea (and, in more elite realm, that of Rachel Kushner in "The Hard Crowd.") Namely, that their "brands" are grounded in experiences of otherness and taste defined by an elusiveness that's been rendered obsolete by tech's Pandora's Box, "the internet." What Tea, Bernstein and Kushner cringingly share is datedness, and the impossibility of remaining an enfant terrible into middle age (though one sees an approximation of their pathetic, clown like visages in Bette Davis' Baby Jane).

Like Tea, another San Francisco writer who shares a similarly sing-song prose style, Bernstein's text leads us to bridge of transition from thrift store coat wearing club kid who fails to passover into adulthood. His endless stories about public sex are bookended with judgements about assimilationist gays which he seems to both covet and resent, clones with wedding rings who inhabit vacuous lives that are grounded in creature comforts.

At its core, "The Freezer Door" is a book about a rich boy gone bad for a couple decades and who, like Tea, wakes up and horrified, realizes they're middle-aged and that some moisturizer with a mortgage might not be such a bad thing (meanwhile, still issuing shrill judgements against the bourgeois while indulging their taste for the same, albeit under the category of "self-care.")

So, if you're dying to know what an Ivy League drop out who's dabbled in prostitution and "finally" bought property with the help of mom, and grandma's $$$, this is the book for you, a narrative about a former club kid who has too much time on their hands (this reads like a 21st century gay version of "Diary of a Mad Housewife"), who cannot resolve the fact of their inherited wealth and privilege with aspirations of being Mother Jones in a thrift store shift and who like Patty Hearst returns to the cosseted and reliable bosom of consumer culture. Boomers who made a similar journey - from Vietnam War protesting hippies to Trump - so if nothing else, these works are signals about how Gen X is beginning its transition into acquisition, one limned (as its exhaustively been by the Boomers) with a sentimental regard for their "radical" pasts. If "Hair" could be revived and sell out its Broadway run, what's to stop Bernstein and Tea from collaborating on a musical "The Real World"?

To Matt / Mattilda's credit, there are some "funny" lines but given the barely concealed aspirations of wealth and property that this seemingly autobiographical text contains, Bernstein seems better suited to writing gags / jokes for Kathy Griffin, or perhaps jingles for Whole Foods.

[Shadib Bin · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Freezer Door by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore

What a wonderful read. One of those books, that I’ll deeply cherish from here onwards, in my life. On the front of the cover, Maggie Nelson, someone I deeply love, wrote this:

“In a happy paradox common to great literature, it’s a book about not belonging that made me feel deeply less alone.”

Couldn’t have agreed more.

I came across Mattilda’s work by way of The End of San Francisco earlier this year, during my trip in New York. I remember finding that book, after perhaps meandering for 1.5 hours in the Strand. And what a great find - that book too, was amazing.

The Freezer Door is very different to EoSF, in that, Mattilda is more exploring conscious and subconscious thoughts as they are happening with myriad of things she is engaging in. They are mostly around three buckets:

A. Friendships and her deep desires to want more robust forms of them, that could include sexual intimacy. This could well be misinterpreted but I see where she is coming from. where she deeply treasures strong bond - and not in some inappropriate way. But a way that allows these friendships to lift each other up. Make way for more closeness. At a time when finding support and camaraderie can be hard, could we be open and ask for more from each other, assuming we can give that? Her asks never felt overbearing, although she could do more with being clear on her asks and expectations.

B. Her finding intimacies via engaging in sexual activities across dark mediums - be it alleyways, stairs, parks, bathhouses, parties, many of those nuanced spaces - where I know people love to be condescending without knowing the histories - but I know these places can often give us the touch, closeness to fellow humans, that is often taken away from people all along their lives. I believe this was perhaps her strongest out of the 3 key focus areas of the book. Her genuine tenderness to these men and herself, situations she knew were expiring soon after an ejaculation here or there, Mattilda knows how to rope you in as reader. The tender touch on her arched back - Mattilda would clearly say, how this touch, this moment is everything she could ever ask for and stay with in her life. The writings almost transports me around her, physically. But she, and I, both know, they end. They end. They end. You can see Mattilda reckoning with that side of loneliness and it’s heartbreaking. But seeing her show up, time and time again, even with her physical pain and deterioration, I cannot help but feel immensely grateful to know someone like her exists, and have the courage to write all of her feelings - warts and all. That although she doesn’t have what she wants (a reliable relationship that gives her sexual pleasure along with what her love languages are), she is still willing to show up for herself.

C. Her own navigation of the above, and where she stands with it all, in her terms. Her explorations with use of condoms at all times is courageous, even as the community is heavily dependent on PrEP medications, and her stance is very clear, and affirmative.

Or does she tell her friends when they deeply disappoints? Does she keep it to herself? How does she handle it? She asks herself.

Or what about her dancing at queer spaces, bathhouses, or anywhere she can, without use of alcohol or drugs? This was empowering as similar to The End of San Francisco, we yet again see how clearly Mattilda is open to and deeply wants to explore alternative modalities in living her best life, even when things devastate us. Status quo. And if not status quo, raging gentrifications.

——

It’s a book, that made me feel less alone because I have had very similar things, feelings that I have reckoned or been reckoning by myself (sometimes with my therapist, some friends), thereby assuming a lot of shame along with it. Because that’s what shame does. It takes hold of you when you need help & affection the most. To see a writer write all this and more - so openly- it’s what makes life worth living and fighting for.

[Glen Helfand · Rating 5 out of 5]

Behind the freezer door there is an ice cube tray and and ice cube. They have a relationship that involves form and fluidity. Towards the end of this book, in which they appear sporadically, the two ponder disasters, what might happen in various difficult situations where clearly the result would be melting. That is one topic of this book in which Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore is on a lamenting quest to find satisfying intimacy, a merger of mind, body and emotion. The author is a queer person who is open to many forms of intimacy, and writes of friends, lovers, family members, strangers on the street with an eye towards how to connect. There is much sex, so many anonymous encounters, some leading to moments of tenderness and maybe even repeated trysts. There's also a lot of disappointment and joyous dancing. It's complicated, but also simple, or at least rooted in ordinary moments of life.

There's so much truth to Sycamore's elliptical observations of loneliness and interaction, which are ultimately cycles of longing. Questions rearrange and reverse themselves, and if there are no solid satisfactory answers, Sycamore embraces the conundrums. She isn't giving up, just plans on continuing the quest without a map.

[John Antoniello · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am thinking about The Freezer Door a lot. It is the kind of writing that touches something vital, and then stays there, still touching and refusing to let go. In many ways this book feels like the invert sibling to Close To The Knives. A sibling because it feels forged from the same emotional urgency to find connection in a disconnected world. And an invert because of Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore's generous capacity to exchange Wojnarowski's burning rage for something far more tender. At one point in The Freezer Door, she reflects on Wojnarowski's anger as a 'clichéd sort of masculinist triumph' and wonders if, had he lived, would he have unlearned this response? I'd like to imagine that this book, both the writing of it and the reading of it, is a kind of active practice of further unlearning. The Freezer Door underscores how deeply embedded we are in a culture of alienation, even (and perhaps especially) for those who prioritize connection, vulnerability, compassion and love above all else. Since reading it, my heart is a little more broken, but I also feel much less alone.

[Rachal · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am speechless, but also feel so much connection from someone who writes about the longing for connection and the dynamics of queer relationships that get close, yet not close enough.

This feels cliché to say, because I feel it whenever I read a really good book, but it felt like I knew the author, Mattilda, and she knew me, and the words were thoughts and feelings I often feel, but hardly let escape. It’s always the raw, authentic, vulnerability that gets me. And Mattilda does it, freely.

[Zach Strassburger · Rating 1 out of 5]

There were lines that were brilliant, but the book as a whole had no arc and was a miserable read. I saved the lines I liked and then looked at them at the end and said, that’s it? I kept reading for those? Meh. Do not recommend.